This rollicking novel of the 1919 Black Sox Scandal is a sort of hybrid
of Ragtime, Eight Men Out &
You
Know Me, Al. Luther Pond, a sportswriter for William Randolph
Hearst's New York Morning Journal, shares the narration with "Buck" Weaver.
Between them they weave a tale that intersperses portraits of John L. Sullivan,
Ty Cobb, Hearst, George M. Cohan, etc. (here's a description of Cobb: "watching
him play, it was possible to speculate, in defiance of logic, that winning
was not his only concern; that Ty Cobb was consumed by another, more primitive
objective: to annihilate the egos of other men" ) with the story of how
eight players on the best team in baseball came to participate in a scheme
to lose a World Series.

For anyone who knows the story of the Black Sox, much of the book will
be familiar, but there are some nice set pieces--especially the Jeffries/Johnson
fight--& the world of newspapering & Yellow Journalism is as much
a focus of the story as baseball.